Why Griffin Poetry Prize-winning poet Billy-Ray Belcourt writes with passion and an urgent call to action – CBC

‘I’m trying to see how much I can get away with, in terms of having my radical politics in my work.​’

Jan 09, 2020

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. His debut collection of poetry, This Wound is a World, issued a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain without giving up on the future.

Belcourt won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for This Wound is a World. The collection also won the 2018 Indigenous Voices Award for most significant work of poetry in English and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry.

In his second book, NDN Coping Mechanisms, Belcourt uses poetry, prose and textual art to explore how Indigenous and queer communities and identities are left out of mainstream media. The work has two parts — the first explores everyday life and the second explores influential texts such as Treaty 8.

Read More: https://www.cbc.ca/books/why-griffin-poetry-prize-winning-poet-billy-ray-belcourt-writes-with-passion-and-an-urgent-call-to-action-1.5381329